Thursday, August 31, 2017

Q:
You’ve noted that some of the inspiration for The Necklace came from family
memorabilia. How did these letters and journals help lead to the creation of
the novel?

A:
My husband’s great-grandmother’s scrapbook memorializing the house parties she threw
in the 1920s was a useful primary document. Looking at it was almost like
looking in a portal as it provided such a direct glimpse into another
time.

We
moved into a family house about 10 years ago, and the scrapbook had always been
in the house. I revisited it a lot while writing the 1920s portions of the book
as it helped to get me in the mood of the ‘20s.

I
also had access to Amasa Stone Mather’s journals and letters of a grand tour he
took around the world in 1907. The letters were most helpful to get the wording
and word usage right for the letters that show up in The Necklace.

Q:
The book includes sections set in the 1920s, as you’ve noted, and also in 2009.
Can you say more about how you researched the 1920s chapters?

A:
Aside from the scrapbook, I spent time at the Western Reserve Historical
Society here in Cleveland in their reading room.

The
excellent librarians there introduced me to two society gossip magazines in
Cleveland, The Bystander and Town Topics. They were the Us Weekly and People
magazines of 1920s Cleveland.

I
requested boxes of them, and it was incredibly helpful to just page through the
magazines and look at the topics of the articles, the advertisements, the
wedding announcements and the engagement announcements. They gave perspective
as to the concerns and distractions of the time.

Q:
Did you write the chapters in the order in which they appear in the book, or
did you focus on one time period before tackling the other?

A:
I wrote the 1920s story first. That story had been percolating in my head for a long
time, and I wrote it straight through. Then I turned to the modern-day story
and worked on that.

I
was going to keep them that way, in two chunks. But then I printed them out, put
the chapters on my floor, and started literally, physically combining them. I
was mainly concerned with pacing at that point.

After
I had them combined in a plot and pace that made sense to me, I needed to sand
and polish the joints, rewriting some portions and rearranging others so that
it flowed and made sense.

Q:
The necklace in the book is inspired by an actual piece of jewelry. What made
you choose to include it in the novel?

A:
The necklace acts as an important part of the plot. It’s a physical object that
joins together the two timelines. It’s also a useful device for examining what
the Quincy family looks like at its peak and what it looks like a hundred years
later.

Additionally,
I had lived in India and became interested in Indian jewelry while living
there. So that interest too, served as inspiration for the necklace in the
book.

A:
I wrote part of the book while I was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at
the Mount, her home in Lenox, Mass. The program is offered once a year in the
spring before the house is opened to visitors for the season. The two-week
residency allowed me to work in Edith Wharton’s very bedroom where she wrote.

They’re
accepting applications now for the 2018 residency.It’s open to three women writers. The
experience was productive and transformative for my work. I highly recommend
it.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Stephen Savage is the author and illustrator of the new children's picture book Little Plane Learns to Write. His other books include Little Tug and The Mixed-Up Truck, and his editorial illustrations have appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. He teaches at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and he lives in Brooklyn.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Little Plane Learns
to Write?

A: My agent suggested this idea. I had done other vehicle
books with Roaring Brook. You start feeling like you’re in need of help in
coming up with other ideas.

An airplane made sense; we already had a truck and a boat.
My agent, Brenda Bowen, liked the idea of a plane that wrote. It gets the
literacy element in. I tried other ideas and they didn’t work, and I went back
to it. I tried a submarine, a trolley. It worked out nicely…

I can bounce things off of her. She headed Bowen Press at
Harper Collins. She understands these books very well. We hatched these vehicle
books together. When an agent or an editor has a vision, you follow it…

Q: Did the story come first, or the illustrations?

A: The story. I’m primarily an illustrator; I feel that’s my
strong suit. The writing, I’ve had to bring up to the level of the
illustrations. We all have writing skills—we’re trained as kids—but to write
for a picture book is different, you’re writing more poetically, and it’s
short.

I feel if you’re going to do both writing and illustrating,
the writing comes first. For years, I was doing editorial illustration. It
always starts with the text. I thought, I’ll illustrate it however the story
demands.

We tried a couple of different ways. My editor, Neal Porter,
suggested a skywriter who couldn’t get the letters to write. The idea Neal had
[is that the plane] would write "READ." It’s a book about how he has problems
writing “read.” We had the idea of anagrams, moving the letters around.

But I thought that’s not something kids [deal with]. My
daughter was 6. [At that age] learning is probably not about the order of the
letters but it’s a physical thing. They can’t write P so it isn’t backwards. I remembered when I was a kid, I was airsick. I thought, the airplane
should be airsick. The experiences should touch on the world of a child.

Once you find the key, you put the key in the lock and the
book is solved. Once you get the idea, the writing of it is pretty quick. It’s
all about the pacing. Then you can start the illustrations. But I take much
longer than the [actual] writing. You spend six months on a thing that took a week to
write.

The writing process is not just writing the words. I had to
spend months thinking about it. For most writer/illustrators, that’s how it goes.
The exception is if you want to use a certain type of picture—say a nighttime
book—[and then write something to go with it].

Q: You mentioned the idea of literacy. What do you hope your
audience takes away from the story?

A: I think children’s books should be fun; they shouldn’t be
didactic. Ideally you want a book that secretly, slyly, puts in a teaching
method or a moral that gives it some substance, but if the book isn’t fun the
message will be lost because the kid isn’t going to engage with it. The best
books should be fun, should be an adventure—and you peel back the layers.

At the time I’m writing books, I’m a parent, and that’s
coming through in a genuine way. I’m not trying to force a message on anyone.
My daughter is 8 now and is out of the picture book [phase]—how will I get
ideas? Hang around a kindergarten class?

Obviously, I like books that are inspirational and
uplifting. You forget how hard that is. You want a story about a thing you’re
really struggling with, just like adults want a book about something they’re
really struggling with. It’s tricky. It’s trial and error.

Q: Who are some of your own favorite authors?

A: It’s always changing. Certain people pop into your mind.
Crockett Johnson and Harold and the Purple Crayon. I love the simplicity of
that book. It doesn’t feel like a kids’ book; anyone can enjoy that book. Just
the title is brilliant.

I love Golden Book illustrations. There’s a guy I admire a
lot named Rojankovsky, who did tons of books. There were a lot of Eastern Europeans
and Russians. Those Golden Books weren’t so much about star authors; it was
about the Golden brand. Rojankovsky did a Golden Bible book, a whole
illustrated bible. [His style was] constructivist and modern. You can see
Russian constructivism in his work.

There are people right now who are really good. Me…Jane by
Patrick McDonnell. It won a Caldecott honor. It’s about Jane Goodall. It’s
really simple and sweet; it has emotion.

A book nobody knows was my favorite as a kid--The Whales Go
By, illustrated by Paul Galdone. The author was Fred Phleger. It’s all about
the journey of whales from Alaska to Mexico. Their journey, to me, was really
exciting.

Sendak is an inspiration to me. The Nutshell Library is so
good and so funny. It has a biting sense of humor, as much as you can for
little kids. Sendak was good with real child-attitude.

There’s Virginia Lee Burton. You can see the influence of
that [style] everywhere. I like books from that era.

Tops on my list, right behind Crockett Johnson, is Lois
Lenski. She was amazing. Her books are kid-friendly. She was an amazing woman;
she was married and had kids and would work after her kids were in bed. She
would help underprivileged kids. She had an amazing life.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: There’s always one book finished and waiting to come out.
Jack B. Ninja—it’s the first book I’ve illustrated for somebody else in eight
or nine years. It’s cute—it’s written by Tim McCanna. He has a whole bunch of
books coming out now. It’s for Orchard Books, part of Scholastic.

The text is really fun—it’s a rhyming text. It’s an
adventure story about a little ninja, like a little James Bond. It gave me a
chance to create a fantasy Japanese world. That’s for the spring. It’s going to
be a big Scholastic book club book.

Then I’m working on one now that’s coming out later that
year, for Neal Porter, Babysitter from Another Planet. The text is written and
I’m doing the illustrations. It takes place in a ranch house from the ‘50s. It
has a pink kitchen…[It’s like] the Mad Men era. I love the Mad Men era. A lot
of people are interested in mid-century design…in a way, it’s the new comfort
furniture style.

Then there’s another book which is not far enough along, so
I’m not going to mention it. There are usually two in the works, either born or
almost born.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: People who want to be children’s book illustrators want
to know the path. The path is very different for everyone. I’m going to be
turning 53; I was late to the game. I started when I was 40. It’s helpful for
people to know it takes a long time; it doesn’t happen quickly. You spend a
long time on the path.

I didn’t decide until I was 30—it seems young [now]. People like
Peter Brown or Dan Santat were undergraduate art majors and started publishing
out of the gate. I worked in publishing for many years. I went to graduate
school at the School of Visual Arts when I was 30. For a number of years, I was
doing adult illustrations. I was working for The New York Times.

When I did Polar Bear Night, I felt I had something to say.
It takes time to develop the confidence. You’re drawing on your own life
experience. Little Tug was the first book I wrote…I felt I had enough skills to
do an entire book. There was a long preparatory period to get there. The career
has been a work in progress.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for this modern-day
Jane Eyre story set in San Francisco?

A: I’ve always loved Jane Eyre--it was such a groundbreaking
book for its time; Jane really qualifies as an early feminist.

My former husband was a fourth generation San Franciscan who
was raised in the uber-wealthy high society world that the Rochesters inhabit
(in fact, I used the building he grew up in as a model for their mansion).

It was so strange to me to discover, after nearly a decade
of living in San Francisco, that there was this entire world most of the city
barely knew about, complete with such dated traditions as cotillions and men’s
clubs.

I wanted to show that dichotomy through the eyes of my
Janie, who feels just as much like a fish out of water as I did.

Q: What did you see as the right blend between Charlotte
Bronte’s original story and your own creation?

A: I really wanted to modernize the story and deconstruct it
at the same time, kind of like putting the original in a blender. So I
reimagined a lot of the key scenes from Bronte’s book but made sure they were
incorporated: like the session with a fortune teller, the red room, and the
backstabbing crowd Janie is suddenly surrounded by.

Q: What do you think still intrigues people today about Jane
Eyre?

A: I think that Jane Eyre qualifies as one of the first true
heroines in fiction, in that she refuses to accept the terms society thrusts on
her and insists on thinking for herself. That’s always very compelling,
especially for girls and young women. Plus the Gothic vibe, the sense that
there’s something sinister in the shadows, gives it a woo-woo factor that drives
the story forward.

It’s funny because before I re-read the story, I mainly
remembered the romantic aspects of it, but there’s a significant chunk of the
book that relates to her childhood and another where she finds long-lost
relatives (a little too coincidentally, IMHO).

I wanted to achieve that same balance, between Janie’s past,
present, and future.

Q: Who are some of your favorite authors?

A: Too many to list: I love Tana French, Karin Slaughter,
Don Winslow, Kate Atkinson, Dennis Lehane…really, I could go on and on. There
are just so many extremely talented people out there working primarily in crime
fiction right now.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m actually developing a TV pilot. I’m keeping it close
to the vest until I’m further along.

Monday, August 28, 2017

Jonathan Lynn is the author of the new novel Samaritans, which takes place at a Washington, D.C., hospital. He is the director of 10 films, including Clue and My Cousin Vinny, and he wrote the BBC series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. His other books include The Complete Yes, Minister and Comedy Rules. He is also an actor and lawyer, and he lives in New York.

Q:
Your book takes place at a hospital in Washington, D.C. How do you see it
fitting in with the current debate over health care in this country?

A:
The book is about the utter failure of the U.S. healthcare system. The World
Health Organization ranks U.S. healthcare 38th best in the world, behind
Colombia (22nd) and Saudi Arabia (26th), and just above Cuba.

According
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 25 other industrialized
nations do better than the United States at infant mortality.

With
more than 250,000 deaths a year, medical errors are the third leading cause of
death in America, behind heart disease and cancer. And the number one cause of
bankruptcy in the United States is medical debt.

Obamacare
made it somewhat better but there are still 27 million Americans without health
insurance, and Trunpcare is striving to nearly double that number. It’s a
catastrophe for anyone who is not wealthy.

So
I set my new novel, Samaritans, in the fictional Samaritans Medical Center in
Washington, D.C., a struggling hospital beset (like most hospitals) by rising
costs and poor management. In desperation the Board hires a hotel man as its
new CEO: Max Green, the head of hotel operations at a Vegas casino.

He
understands about check-in and check-out, number of dinners served, number of
beds occupied but he has no interest in health care. He does, however, see how
to make a huge profit out of hospital care, potentially billions.

Q:
How did you come up with the idea for Max?

A:
You never know where your characters come from – at least, I don’t. As you
write, they grow and start to live on their own.

I
wanted Max to believe completely that the business school model is right for
every institution and service in America. I wanted him to be a man who puts
profit first, but for what he believes are sound economic reasons - he
doesn’t think that, ultimately, any other reasons matter. A man who doesn’t
believe in “entitlements” – in his mouth it’s a derogatory word.

To
Max, paradoxically, if you need entitlements you don’t deserve them, because
they go to people who are lazy, feckless or in some other way unworthy. “People
can’t have what they can’t afford,” Max explains. “That’s what got America into
this economic mess – people wanting something for nothing. There’s no morality
in that, is there?”

He
has lost all understanding of what used to be called the deserving poor. So Max
had to be materialist, smart but in a limited way, a narcissist… who better
than a man who had previously run casinos before becoming CEO of the Samaritans
Medical Center?

Q:
Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you
make many changes along the way?

A:
I usually know approximately how anything I write will end but how it gets
there is a daily process of discovery. The more you learn about your characters
the more they have to take control.

Harold
Pinter called it “listening to your characters.” Not that I write anything like
Pinter, much as I admire him. My style is more influenced by Carl Hiassen or
Elmore Leonard.

I
wanted this novel to have real velocity. I hoped it would be one of those books
you can’t put down, I wanted it to be a vertiginous experience. Joseph Heller,
writing about Catch 22, said that Nabokov in Laughter in the Dark took a
flippant approach to situations that were both deeply tragic and pathetic.

“I
began to try for a similar blending of the comic and the tragic,” he said, “so
that everything that takes place seems to be grotesque yet plausible.”This precisely describes the way I have
approached most of my writing although, sadly, Samaritans is much closer to
reality than you might like to think.

For
instance, after I started writing Samaritans I read that Aetna, one of our biggest
insurance companies, had hired the CEO of Caesar’s Palace to run their health
insurance division! But why not? Healthcare is the ultimate lottery.

Q:
What role do you see humor playing in today’s politics? Or what role do you
think it should play?

A:
Art is criticism of life, and comedy is criticism by ridicule. Comedy has a
vital role to play in controlling those who would have power over their fellow
citizens because it criticizes the institutions of society and those who run
them unjustly, unfairly or corruptly.

That’s
not just politicians, of course: that’s also the cops, the courts, the prisons,
the military, academia, all institutions that are capable of misusing their
power. I don’t know anyone who writes comedy who is not angry, or driven by a
sense of injustice and unfairness, and a desire to reveal hypocrisy.

But
it has to be tempered with a sense of irony. Humor is the best way I know to
make social and political ideas and paradoxes accessible. I learned that at an
early age from the comedies of George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh and Billy
Wilder. There’s a lot about this in my book Comedy Rules.

Q:
What are you working on now?

A:
I’m toying with ideas for two new books. One is an epic, multi-generational
saga, if I can find the energy. Another is a sort of memoir, not about me so
much as about extraordinary people I’ve encountered in my life.

I’ve
also written two screenplays, one a comedy about a modern marriage (another of
those institutions) and the other an adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s wonderfully
subversive feminist play The Constant Wife. Both have producers who are trying
to set them up.

And
my play, The Patriotic Traitor (published by Faber and Faber), which had a
sold-out run in an off-West End theater, will soon be opening in London’s West
End.

Q:
Anything else we should know?

A:
In 1987 a man called Rick Scott started a company called Columbia when he
purchased two hospitals in El Paso, Texas. Scott was CEO of Columbia when it
merged with the Hospital Corporation of America and he turned Columbia/HCA into
one of the largest health care companies in the world.

Forbes
magazine said Scott bought “hospitals by the bucketful and promised to squeeze
blood from each one.” Scott wanted to “do for hospitals…what McDonald’s has
done in the food business.”

In
1997, under Scott’s management, HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies, fraudulently
billing Medicare and other healthcare programs, and the eventual settlement was $1.7 billion.
The Justice Department described it, at the time, as “the largest health care
fraud case in U.S. history.”

Rick
Scott stepped down and left HCA with a $9.88 million severance package along
with 10 million shares of stock worth about $350 million. HCA continues to
thrive and now manages 168 hospitals and 116 surgery centers.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

B.G. Firmani is the author of the new novel Time's a Thief, which focuses on a young woman in 1980s New York City. Firmani's work has appeared in a variety of publications, including BOMB Magazine and Kenyon Review. She lives in New York.

Q:
How did you come up with the idea for Time’s a Thief and for your main
character, Chess?

A:
First, thank you for this interview—it’s beautiful to have thoughtful readers. There
were a lot of different things that smashed up together that led to this book.

One
really was the experience of crossing 34th Street right after the NYPD had graduated
its cadet class of 2008 and having the streets around me suddenly flooded by a
sea of blue—the visual moment of that was so striking.

(I’m
trying to remember which of the Kieślowski “Three Colors” trilogy, maybe “Blue,”
that has this crazy thing where a group of little girls with pink water-wings
suddenly runs into the frame and jumps into the pool—a sort of throwaway incursion
that’s just fantastic to the eye.)

It
stayed with me, the idea of a character being in an accidentally charged moment
and then coming into contact with a piece of “public” information that provides
a very private shock to her—in this case, the obituary of Clarice Marr, a woman
who has caused the narrator so much pain, right there on the front page of The New
York Times.

Another
current was that I’d had a notion to write a sort of retelling of Brideshead
Revisited in a late 20th century American context—the class outsider captivated
by a vivid, pedigreed, flawed family.

The
rigor around a project like that is beyond me, and also a little dreary to
contemplate, but it did help give a kind of general outline to the book: the
character Chess will be drawn to this family; she’ll “engage” with them; and
she’ll be in a way chewed up and spat out by them. But there will also remain
the romance of it, the melancholy of a lost past.

Also—structurally
speaking—when I started Time’s a Thief, I had recently read Assata Shakur’s autobiography,
a brilliant book.

She
syncopates chapters between a current reality and a past one—the past line
moves forward in time, while the present line moves backward in time until, more
or less, they meet in the middle; and then the present reality switches gears,
becoming the forward-moving narrative.

This
was a very sophisticated structure that, when I tried something like it for my
own book, of course fell to dust in my hands. But some of its armature remained—much
improved by my wise editor, Gerry Howard—and it certainly helped give me an
engine to keep the novel moving as I was writing it.

Here’s
the thing with Chess. I needed her to not have all the answers, to perhaps
think, entirely mistakenly, that she’s quite the smartie while she’s really a
sort of babe in the woods.

If
she’d had the savvy to get away from the Marr-Löwensteins and not leave herself
open to their particular brand of emotional abuse, there would be no story.

So
while I wrote it in the first person, and while we have plenty of shared
characteristics, Chess isn’t me—she’s perhaps more guileless, more porous.
She’s also struggling not to collapse under others’ notions of how she should
be.

When
the character Jerry praises her for being “so somber and quiet,” after the mean
girl at the party purposely splashes gravy on Chess, somewhere in my mind (bear
with me here) was the scene in Jane Eyre when poor old Bertha Mason, the
proverbial madwoman in the attic, is revealed to Jane, and Mr. Rochester
praises Jane for standing “so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell.”

I
love Jane Eyre, but when I was young and reading that book, I was incensed. How
can Jane remain silent? I wanted her to punch Rochester in the face for being a
lying bastard (of course, in the end he gets his terrible punishment—and also
loses the inconvenient first wife).

So,
in my book, after Jerry praises Chess for her retreating Victorian ways, I have
her explode at him. Which sounds like it would be great fun to write, but it
was pretty herky-jerky going—not terribly fluid, since so much of it had to do
with trying to keep the whine out of Chess’ voice.

I
wanted her to be strong, to stand her ground; but also she’s in love with this
man, so she’s fighting her own desire to capitulate and be the person he
imagines her to be.

Q:
What inspired the Marr-Löwenstein family, with whom Chess becomes involved, and
how would you characterize Chess’s relationship with them?

A:
Let’s maybe concentrate on the mother first, Clarice. I’ve always been
interested in power relationships, who is the dominant group, who is excluded and
oppressed; and also how such power relationships play out within an oppressed
group.

Funny
thing here: there have only been two times in my life that someone at work
asked me to get them coffee, and both of those times that someone was a woman.
Depressing, right? And completely understandable in some ways.

I
recently read an excellent article
in The Atlantic by Olga Khazan, “Why Do Women Bully Each Other at Work?” and
one of the things she talks about is the idea of the queen bee protecting her
territory—as well as the older woman coming down hard on the younger one, the
idea being that if that older woman had to struggle to get where she is, shouldn’t
the younger one know what that tastes like?

Of
course I find this both cruel and specious, but I understand its genesis.
There’s plenty of pain that a character like Clarice would be carrying; she’s
someone who cut herself off from her past and struggled to reinvent herself,
and she’s really thrilled to find a docile, dazzled Catholic girl like Chess
whom she can both mold and undermine.

As
for the Marr-Löwensteins, I do love the idea of a certain kind of big family that
creates an alluring atmosphere around them, one that’s noisy and larger than
life and has the ferment of creativity about it—so then why not, for the
purposes of fiction, imagine them rich, imagine them beautiful, and have the
dreaming class outsider press her nose up against their window?

Also,
in New York City, there’s a real mash-up of very poor and very rich and
everything in between that in some ways is hard to find anywhere else.

Even
with Manhattan being increasingly homogenized by a boring and entitled money
culture, sad to say—and I could go on until the cows come home about this clown
of a president and his racist and divisive ways—there’s still plenty of
opportunity for, as they say, a cat to look at a queen.

When
I was in grad school years back, I was missing the city so much, and I’d come
into Manhattan, get off the train, buy a bagel and walk for a hundred blocks,
taking in the city.

I’d
pass through working-poor neighborhoods, Mitchell-Lama housing, super-rich
swatches of Park Avenue—and places that to an outsider might seem down-and-out
because of the old housing stock, but that were actually hipster central—and it
would feel amazing to me how it all coexisted, for better or worse.

So
this is something, that unlikely proximity of haves and have-nots, and the
texture that such a thing produces, that I wanted to explore in the book.

Q:
How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A:
Time’s a Thief is taken from the lyrics of the song “Speak Low”: Love is pure
gold/and time a thief.

I’ve
written of this elsewhere, but I first heard the song in college, in the corny
film version of “One Touch of Venus”—Ava Gardner, who is shockingly gorgeous
but sort of a big ham sandwich as an actor, is singing it in a distant duet
with Dick Haymes; she’s actually dubbed.

When
I was in graduate school, I came upon the demo version of it on vinyl, in the
listening room at the Brown library. I loved it so much it hurt. I’d put on the
headphones, drop the needle on the record, and just fly away.

Kurt
Weill wrote the music, and Ogden Nash wrote the lyrics, and the recording just
starts right in with Weill singing, no fanfare at all. He’s very close to the
microphone and it’s almost as if he’s singing to himself it feels so private.

I
think of Weill’s gentle delivery in his soft German accent, and also I can’t
help but think this: here’s a man who lost his country. Nash might have written
the lyrics, but Weill really feels them; the song is so much about what can’t
ever be regained.

My
editor Gerry is always ribbing me about my alleged smart-aleck turn of mind, but
when he finished my book he said to me (as if astonished), You know, you
actually wrote a very romantic novel! I think the title captures that.

Q:
The novel takes place in New York City. How important is setting to you in your
writing, and could this story have taken place elsewhere?

A:
Certainly such a story could take place anywhere, but it would be a much
different book. Setting’s hugely important for me, but the thing I go back to
time and again as a writer is class and ethnicity.

You
could have Chess’ story play out on a different level in some smaller
“second-tier” city; you could even have it on a micro-level in some tiny
community.

I
think of my sister Colette’s friend Sue, who grew up in a microscopic town in
West Virginia, where there were folks who lived “up the holler” and folks who
lived “down the holler.” I’d imagine the folks up the holler had some asinine
claim to superiority over those who lived down the holler.

Q:
What are you working on now?

A:
Something in the third person! It’s rather a “bigger” novel than Time’s a Thief
in that it moves among three characters. I have to say, telling a story from a
revolving point of view and being able to fly into different characters’ heads—rather
than maintain a consistent first-person voice—has really helped clear out some
mental cobwebs for me.

The
book traces these three characters’ lives from adolescence to adulthood,
mapping the choices that took them away—or nearly away—from the notions they
had of themselves when they were bright young things.

One
of the touchstones for this novel is the essay “Formulary for a New Urbanism,”
where the writer, Ivan Chtcheglov, a poet and theorist later plagued by mental
illness, has an unrealizable ideal of a city in which “…there will be rooms
more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but
love.”

These
words are beautiful to me. Of course it’s a utopian construct, and one that in
many ways mirrors each character’s purity of heart before becoming
“contaminated” by concessions they make in order to live in the world.

In
writing this book, besides having the characters’ voices differentiate
themselves one from another, one of my tasks is to register the toll that all
this living has taken on them.

So,
for instance, the language used by a dreamy idealist of sixteen walking around Passaic
County with a head full of William Carlos Williams will seem wholly alien to
the hard-edged 46-year-old shark he has become, whose time is spent greedily
calculating the split on real estate commissions.

I’m
also sort of amazed to realize how much fun it is to write from the point of
view of a really damaged character. I understand the glee behind certain of
Martin Amis’ awful male characters, I’m dismayed to report.

Q:
Anything else we should know?

A:
Just this, as inspiration for any writer out there who feels like giving up:
keep going. It took me many, many years, many pages of drivel, two thrown-out
novels, and two thrown-out books of short stories—at least—before I published
my first novel.

I
just kept writing. I had to. There was no choice. At some point I understood
that this was my path, and it was foolish to compare myself with anyone else, since
there’s only one of me.

As
a writer, you really are “competing” with no one but yourself. So put your butt
in your chair and do your work. Keep at it, sister. And don’t let the turkeys
get you down.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for House on the
Forgotten Coast and for your character Elise?

A: That is really a tough question because it’s one I’ve
asked myself. I talked with Ray Bradbury about it and found him to be a great
believer in the Muse. He said that I shouldn’t worry about where it was coming
from and just go with the Muse. I did and have always felt she wrote House.
Then again, perhaps I’m a lot like Elise…

In trying to place myself alongside the Muse, I will say
that the idea began with a dream about this really hot guy sitting in a swing.
Imagine my surprise a long time later when he turned up in House! And out of
nowhere it seemed, I wanted to write about a young girl who dies on her wedding
day. I think the Muse handled it well, don’t you?

But where did the idea come from? As a child I visited
friends in Apalachicola who rented an old house big enough, it seemed to me, to
hold my home in one room. I struggled to breathe as I opened and closed giant
sliding doors—my first introduction to pocket doors—and discovered a very
narrow, nearly hidden, stairway that led to upper rooms.

Perhaps that memory built the House of the Forgotten Coast,
but how Elise came to be there is still a mystery.

Past characters have been composites or fashioned loosely on
a movie star or stranger. This wasn’t true of the characters who peopled
Apalachicola, and Elise was the result of numerous revisions.

Like the Muse, I wanted Elise to be jealous of her mother
and spent a lot of time designing a prom dress she was never to wear because
she became a ghostly girl with a rather complex personality and in her own eyes
a rather unattractive misfit. Elise then was ripe to be the recipient of Annelise’s
need of a living person to help her clear Seth’s name of murder.

Q: The novel takes place in Apalachicola, Florida. Could the
story have taken place elsewhere, and how important is setting to your work?

A: If you are to write what you know, I know small Florida
towns. I couldn’t have set the story any place but the South because a certain
type person seems to populate the South, and even if I don’t know the people I
create, they have southern characteristics.

Apalachicola had, I learned when I stayed there with relatives
as a teenager, ghost stories, people who read cards and predicted the future,
interesting things that people where I grew up, only 25 miles away, never
considered a suitable pastime. Apalachicola had a big old building where
teenagers could dance or hang out.

It was creative, colorful and I longed to tell its story, so
different from that of the Bay Harbor I loved and wrote about in The Chinaberry
Album.

Setting, you see, is very important to me, so much so that I
like to make a place a character in its own right.

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started
writing it or did you make many changes along the way?

A: I’m much too disorganized to ever outline a novel or to
think ahead of what might happen. I just write what I see the people do. I have
no idea when or how a novel will end. When it appears to end, I stop writing.
House ends that way. I loved the ending, a mystery to the very last.

Q: Who are some of your favorite authors?

A: I must first pay tribute to some of those who have passed
on but who influenced my work in every sense of the word. These are Tennessee
Williams, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Ray Bradbury, and
Flannery O’Connor.

Today I read so many that it’s difficult to choose a few,
but off the top of my head I think of Scott Fitzgerald, Barbara Kingsolver, Lee
Smith, Ken Follett, Ian McEwan, Daphne Kalotay,
Jeannette Walls, Amor Towles and so many more!

Q: What are you working on now?

A: At the moment I am struggling (no help from the Muse yet)
with The Receding Tide, my third and final novel in the Bay Harbor Trilogy.
When House is really out there I hope to get a better feel for these old
friends. They are mature people now and Anna Lee is recovering from an illness
in her old home in Bay Harbor, now owned by Lola, former resident of the
lighthouse.

I am also tweaking a Christmas play called A Child’s Faith.
And no, despite being about Christmas, it’s not religious in the truest sense.
For those who have read The Chinaberry Album, I’d have to say it’s pure Anna
Lee.

Finally, among the many things I have written, I’d like to
rework and publish a short story titled Two Women. Two Women and A Child’s
Faith are written as both short stories and plays.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: If we are what we eat, I am what I write. It defines me.
I am young at heart, but the calendar tempers that a bit. I often burden the
characters I write about as I have been burdened. I think though that the
burden helped me write, and for that I am grateful.

I am fortunate to have been happily married and to have two
lovely daughters. I love love love animals, especially dogs. I can handle
movies where people do not survive, but bother an animal and I’m out of there! That
says it all, except for one thing. I love pocket doors and live in a house
filled with them.

Q: How much did you know about your great-uncle's work as a
World War II code talker as you were growing up, and what made you decide to
write this book?

A: My family didn't find out about my great-uncle's service
as a code talker until 1994. He died in 1949 and never talked about
it. I didn't know anything about code talking while growing up.

I began to ask questions about code talking after we read a
newspaper article about his group--seven men who used their Lakota/Dakota
language to send messages in secret.

I thought I could find a reference to their work in a book
about the First Cavalry Division in World War II. I went to the library and
planned on collecting just a bit more, a paragraph or two... to save in our
family history file. But as I started searching, I realized that there
wasn't anything recorded about this top secret service.

After a year or so, I connected with someone named John
Langan, who witnessed the code talking in action. He gave me all sorts of
documents, details, information. He persuaded me to write the book.

Q: What type of research did you do to write the book, and
what did you learn that especially surprised you?

A: Research starts with a question. I became more
curious as to why the Sioux Code Talkers would join the Cavalry. John
Langan helped me understand some reasons and he gave me more clues to follow.

I called the next person and asked questions. That person
provided me with another clue, which I followed... And so on. You have to
realize this was the beginning of the internet, so I did a lot of calling by
phone and mailed lots of letters.

Eventually, someone suggested the National Archives, so I
went there. While at the Archives, I made copies of everything I could
find. I went back three times over the course of 20 years.

I continued to gather copies of documents, maps, photos and
made phone calls to museums, historical libraries, tribal historians,
etc. I just kept going. I now have about 10 bins full of research I
collected all these years.

Something that surprised me was the photo catalog at the
National Archives. I was running out of time, so I decided to make copies
of the card catalog indexes and the photos (front and back) that were pulled
for me.

I found more information listed on the backs of the photos-
specific details, places and names. I wasn't expecting that. Some of
those photo details came in handy when I was writing the book.

Decades later, I could use the places and names to do
internet searches. I found some interesting old videos on YouTube and some
digital documents that helped fill in some gaps for me. I was glad I thought to
make those copies that day.

Q: What do you see as the legacy today of the code talkers?

A: When I think about what these men did, or any Native
American soldier did in World War I and World War II, I am in awe. These
men put aside the prejudice their family members endured years before, to stand
and fight alongside a former enemy.

Imagine the strength and fortitude it took to work together
in this way. There had to be some level of trust given on the front
lines. These men worked collaboratively to protect our country in an
honorable way. They put aside their own feelings to fight for our homeland
and community.

I've heard some veterans say they were just doing their job,
but when you really stop and think about it, these men are incredible role
models for all of our children, in fact, for all of us. They volunteered to
serve and sacrificed a great deal to protect our country.

Q: What age group do you think would especially enjoy the
book?

A: The book is appropriate for grades 5 and up, but fits
best with the 7th/ 8th grade curriculum. It is popular with an adult audience
as well.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I go back to school soon--teaching 6th graders. And I
went on two successful "book tours" this summer. This fall, I have
several author events booked already.

In addition, I have one nonfiction picture book I'll be submitting
this week, and two more picture books in various stages of revision. Lastly, I
started researching a couple more interesting people I learned about while
traveling in South Dakota.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I appreciate the generosity of others in helping me get
this book finished and it has been a blessing to connect with so many
incredible people!

I've learned so much over the course of 20 years. I've
enjoyed this journey, which was challenging at times. So, my advice to other writers is be
patient and persevere. Your hard work will pay off at just the right
time.

About Me

Author, THE PRESIDENT AND ME: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE MAGIC HAT, new children's book (Schiffer, 2016). Co-author, with Marvin Kalb, of HAUNTING LEGACY: VIETNAM AND THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY FROM FORD TO OBAMA (Brookings Institution Press, 2011).